City Council plans to save speed cameras before school starts with new bill

Cooperation between City Council and Gov. Cuomo will revive the city's speed-camera law in time for the start of school on Sept. 5. (Mages, Evy /)

Speed cameras are poised to be back in action just in time for the first day of school — no thanks to the state Senate.

A month after the program went dark thanks to inaction in Albany, the City Council will introduce legislation to work around the state Legislature’s role in approving the use of the cameras around schools, Council Speaker Corey Johnson told the Daily News.

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“From the minute the program expired the Council has been looking at the issue to see if there has been anything we can do to get the cameras turned back on before school started,” Johnson said.

While the program operated entirely in the city, it was created through state law, and when that law lapsed this summer, the city could no longer issue tickets to those the cameras caught speeding.

But Johnson said the Council, working with Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio, had found a way to combine city legislation and executive orders to get the program back up and running in time for the first day of school on Sept. 5.

Cuomo will sign an executive order giving the city the ability to access state Department of Motor Vehicle records to determine who owns the cars caught speeding by the cameras so they can be sent summonses, Johnson said.

De Blasio, meanwhile, will sign a message of necessity to suspend the typical aging period of the legislation and allow the Council to vote on the bill more quickly than it normally could, Johnson said.

“We’re taking action because it’s urgent, and I’m grateful to both the governor and the mayor for working with me and the Council in a cooperative way,” Johnson said.

Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, said the legislation is an example of the mayor and governor working together to solve a problem — something he called “remarkable.”

“It really speaks to the support for expanding the program,” he said.

The Council will hold a hearing on the bill on Tuesday, and it will vote at an emergency meeting on Wednesday. Under the charter, the mayor must then wait five days to sign the legislation — just in time for kids heading back to class.

The development comes after weeks of protests from safe-streets advocates, many of them family members of people killed in traffic crashes. White praised them for “not taking no for an answer.”

One proposal that died in Albany would have expanded the program to include more cameras. The Council bill won’t do that, but it will set up the framework for the city to do so in the future.

“It will allow for the expansion of the program, but we haven’t had the conversations yet at the granular level with the administration and with the advocates about what that would look like,” Johnson said.

In a statement, de Blasio spokesman Seth Stein said “speed cameras save kids' lives. We can't risk 1.1 million students returning to school unprotected, so the mayor is planning to do what the State Senate refused — putting children above politics and signing legislation to bring back our speed cameras."